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Monday, April 11, 2011

The Crazy Life

Hello again!

Time is flying by. It has been a pretty normal week. There is a family that is in our ward and the son and mom are recent converts and the dad is an excommunicated member from 10 years back and he is trying to be able to get baptized again. We have really grown to love this family. There are two other sons but one is 6 years old and the other is a baby. This family has no money and tuesday was the birthday of the oldest son. Hermana Izaguirre and I wanted to do something special. We bought a cake and some other things and we went to their house. Douglas (the birthday boy) wasn´t there yet and so the parents told us to hide in the bedroom. When Douglas got home, they asked him to get a diaper and he opened the door and we jumped out while blowing on those annoying horn things. He almost had a heart attack but was really grateful for everything as well as the family was really happy. During Christmas time, mom sent me some of those bracelets that have shapes to them that are apparently so popular. At Christmas time I hadn´t seen them before but now they are all over the place. So we gave him some bracelets. He told us that the kids at school wanted to buy them from him the next day. We were so happy to be able to make a difference to this family. They are really something special and are passing through a really difficult situation.

Other happy news is that Elmer Barillas now has 2 days without smoking! We are so happy. He had told us that he heard that the first three days are the hardest. So he has 2 down and one more to go (today). We are praying that this family will be able to get baptized. The other problem is the wife. She is a little bit more rebellious and says that she can´t quit drinking coffee. But she follows the counsel of her husband and he says that he is going to lock the doors so she can´t leave to buy coffee in the store.

We are finding many positive investigators through are recent convert Ena. She wants everyone to go to church and that is helping us a lot. We were teaching one of her friends that went to general conference named Rosa who is 22 years old. Rosa was telling us that she has never visited churches before and has never liked any one of them but she liked conference. She said that there is an evangelical church near her house and when people are having marital problems, they pray that either the wife or the husband will die and the other will be left widowed. Crazy El Salvador!

We´ve been having to go to the dentist recently for Hermana Izaguirre and that means that we have to wake up at 4:30 some mornings to catch the bus at 5:30 which means that I am really tired. While we were in the waiting room at the dentist´s office, I completely fell asleep and Hermana Izaguirre had to wake me up saying that she was done. Yesterday was an interesting day at church. It rained in the morning and so that means that many people don´t go to church. It is funny that we can be in a country that it rains half of the year. And this half of the year, people don´t leave their houses. But also for some reason the electricity and the water were out in the church and so the bathrooms smelled terrible and so we only had sacrament meeting. It was a very strange Sunday and we felt like we were in the twilight zone.

We are working hard for the baptisms of the familia Barillas and two other people (Cindy and Jorge) this week and only time will tell. I was talking to Hermana Izaguirre about the stress of the mission and the hard part about it is that are success relies a lot on the agency of other people.We are still working hard and I know that the Lord is blessing us for our efforts. We hope that we will soon see the fruits of our labors. I can't believe how fast the time goes.